The Wettest County in the World

by Matt Bondurant

  After a moment he hauled Rakes out of the stream by his shirtfront. Rakes sputtered and coughed, clutching at his throat, scrabbling in the muddy leaves. Howard stood and debated kicking the man a few times just for sport, but decided it would be better if he was left unmarked. He reached down and turned Rakes’s head to face him. Rakes shuddered and sobbed, his face slick with water, saliva, and snot. He was a bit blue, Howard thought, but he’d be all right.

  Remember this, Charley, he said. You hear?

  Then Howard started up the hill, leaving Rakes lying by the stream. He turned after a few steps, regarding the huddled man shivering in the wet.

  You should know, Howard said, that we had nothin’ to do with Jeff Richards. He had plenty of enemies. He done himself in some other way.

  The dogs began to howl again as Howard stepped off into the dark.

  Chapter 33

  JULY 1, 1935

  THERE WERE MEN standing everywhere, leaning on long black cars, men on the sidewalks holding their hats and wiping their foreheads in the heat, men on stools along the window of Jess’s Lunch, men in the shade of the granite bank building, men in suits and hats lining the steps to the court building, several holding cameras at their sides, assistants with bulky black cases fingering spare flashbulbs in their jacket pockets. The courthouse stood like a sundial in the Harrisonburg town square, the shadow dropping first over the bank opposite, then across to the lunch counter and the Baptist church as the afternoon drew on. Around the courthouse a gentle slope of grass ran to the street, cut by a broad set of bluestone steps. It was a warm July day, the sky traced with clouds, and the Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy Trial was finally over after fifty days, longer than the previous record for Virginia, the 1807 trial of Aaron Burr. On a bench in front of the Methodist church a woman sat with a skinny towheaded boy in a white shirt and dungarees; they huddled together and talked quietly. A policeman sat in a chair by the courthouse door, cap pulled low over his eyes to shield the sun, his pistol dangling off his hip.

  There was a palpable shift in the air, a murmur, or perhaps it was imagined, for no real sound came across the square. Yet the men felt that they had heard something from inside the doors. The policeman raised his head, men dropped their cigarettes in the grass, a car door opened. The woman with the little boy remained bent, talking low. Then the courthouse door opened and a man stumbled out into the sunlight. Sherwood Anderson slid a hand through his thinning hair, blinked, then clapped a hat onto his head. He saw the people in the square come to attention for a moment, looking him over, then slumping with disinterest.

  It was a distinctly American tragedy, he thought. The trial had crystallized his thoughts on the matter, and the smoky form of an epic story, one that could be read aloud in a cornfield, began to form in his mind. Anderson came down a few steps and, tucking a copy of The Roanoke Times under his arm, checked his pocket watch.

  Individuality will pass into the smoky realm of history. The day will come, Anderson knew, when we will all become soldiers in the army of the corporate age. When he was a boy there were no autos, planes, radios, chain stores, or great bloated trusts pushing their interests around the world. Men lived free lives then. Anderson tried to describe this in Perhaps Women, which was roundly despised even among friends. He was only trying to say that when the world is mechanized something goes out of men, something elemental is lost. The female world, on the other hand, was ascendant: the world of possessions, the material world. The female is at home among these things. Men suffered for a lack of drive, starving for the tactile world. Instead they develop the pathological obsession with obvious power. A real man doesn’t need these things, and there are so few real men left. This is why Hemingway is so obsessed with the bloody work of bullfighting, and with killing in general. This is why he felt he must crush his former mentor in the public realm.

  Literature is bigger than both of us.

  A groper, Hemingway called him, a muddler of words.

  They had that final drink together in Paris, having been there for a month, Hemingway constantly telling everyone that he would come and see Anderson. On the final day, Anderson was in his room, all his bags packed, and there was a knock on the door and there was Hemingway. How about a drink? he said. They went into a small bar across the street and ordered two beers. Hemingway raised his glass.

  Well, here’s how.

  Then he turned away and walked out of the bar.

  The constant assertion of masculinity is always the most obvious tell of a fake. You do not constantly assert what you know you have.

  I don’t give a damn about all this calling a man a groper, a muddler. We are all facing a wall, but I am throwing the words from my heart.

  The party at the Greenwich restaurant to celebrate the publication of Perhaps Women in 1931, when Faulkner came in, unexpected, and approached somewhat sheepishly. He offered his hand and Anderson took it. Faulkner offered his congratulations. He grinned and pulled at Sherwood’s sleeve.

  Sherwood, he said, what is the matter? Do you think that I am also a Hemy? You know it isn’t true what they say.

  They exchanged some pleasant words before Faulkner wandered off to another part of the party. By this time his fame had grown and eventually the crowd siphoned off to Faulkner’s side of the room, leaving Anderson sitting alone at a booth, holding his hat. He knew that some might see in his expression the knowing look of a writer who understood well what was occurring, a passing of some kind of torch perhaps, and his tight grin was the look of a content elder literary statesman. He stroked his hat, a large, soft hat that he had recently purchased and never worn, watching the crowd around Faulkner, stroking the large hat in his lap as if it were some kind of animal.

  Forty-three years old when Winesburg came out. He wanted to retch when he thought of the time spent in the grinding gears of commerce, participating in the great deceit that snapped men between its fingers every day in the new age of American industrialism. He had walked through the streets for years, thinking little of the lives that crouched behind opaque windows, what crabbed forms sat alone in the darkness, and what hungers they fed there. Oh, if only he had seen behind those doors earlier!

  And now he had focused so long on the precision of the word, the utterance that was most unfettered by artful manipulation, that the thing had become mere style. Sure, it was his style, but the style had become the substance. There was nothing else there. It was over, but he couldn’t stop.

  THE MAY 24, 1935, Roanoke Times headline read: Woman Pilot of Whiskey Cars Is Placed On Stand. Willie Carter Sharpe testified on May 23 for a half hour.

  “So great was the interest with which her appearance has been awaited that it served to overshadow a full day of varied testimony…”

  The experience was a disappointing one for most, including Anderson, who saw his hopes of a great mountain heroine die with her appearance on the witness stand.

  “Mrs. Carter, whose name became so widely known here in the palmy [sic] days of the bootleggers during Prohibition, appeared minus the diamond that once gleamed in her teeth. She was dressed in a white outfit with hat and shoes to match, the dress having brown ruffled sleeves and collar gathered in front with a large cameo pin.”

  To Anderson she was jowly like a bulldog and crass of language and aspect. The overall impression was more like that of a gorilla in a dress.

  THE VERDICT had been read and the trial was finally over. Anderson moved farther down the courthouse steps, snapping a fountain pen into his vest pocket, his brogans scuffing on the limestone block. The policeman looked into the darkened doorway for a moment, then stood back quickly as a crowd of men emerged, flowing out of the courthouse onto the steps and into the lawn, men quickly dispersing across the square as if they had an aversion to any sort of crowd, and each sought out his own space. The men standing around moved to greet some of them, and the men with the cameras raised the heavy contraptions and began to search out the faces of the emerging crowd. She
rwood Anderson sought out the shade of an old oak tree that grew at the edge of the sidewalk. He loosened his dark tie and watched the other men and some women who walked out of the courthouse. The gentle clatter of voices tumbled out over the square as men and women began to talk to one another. Men shook hands and patted each other on the back, and men in expensive summer wool suits carrying leather-sided briefcases stepped into long cars that idled at the curb. A small cordon of police joked together as they headed across the street to Jess’s.

  A midnight-blue roadster parked on the curb caught Anderson’s attention. A woman was at the wheel; she cut the engine and swung her legs out of the car. Maggie wore a long, shimmering dress of brocade silk, the color of jade, her hair pulled back in a simple knot. Anderson was directly in front of her, but she seemed to look through him, gazing at the courthouse with her gypsy stare.

  CARTER LEE WAS acquitted of all charges. Twenty men were convicted, including Sheriff’s Deputy Henry Abshire and other bootleggers and moonshiners who participated in the conspiracy. His case was certainly aided by the demise of Jefferson Richards, the acknowledged first lieutenant in the scheme, and the mysterious passing of Charley Rakes from pneumonia. Also a single juror, a man named Marshall, refused to add Carter Lee to the names of the guilty and threatened to hang the jury. The Bondurant brothers were never formally charged; rather they served as material witnesses for the prosecution.

  A tall man stepped out of the courthouse and into the sunlight, wearing a thin cotton jacket and dungarees. He had a thick scar that ran across his neck that was clear from forty feet away. He paused, and two other men stepped out into the light and stood at his back. They were both tall, one of them an immense figure whose jacket strained to hold his barrel chest, his tanned neck rolling over his starched collar. The other man was obviously younger, with a red face and hawklike nose.

  Sherwood Anderson stepped from the shade of the tree and walked toward the three men.

  The younger man thrust his hands in his pockets and smiled at his brothers for a moment before turning and walking toward the woman and the child on the bench. The towheaded boy, all legs and arms in his overalls, ran to him.

  Epilogue

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR Anderson published his last novel, Kit Brandon, the story of a mysterious and beautiful Appalachian woman who loves fine clothes. She works in various mills, hitchhiking around the country, before becoming involved with a bootlegger and becoming a pilot-car driver for a moonshine syndicate. The book had moderate sales and was a critical failure.

  On February 28, 1941, Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Eleanor, set sail for a tour of South America. Aboard ship one evening Anderson accidentally swallowed a toothpick while eating an hors d’oeuvre. He developed severe abdominal congestion and peritonitis, and eight days later in a hospital in Panama, Sherwood Anderson was dead.

  THE DULING BROTHERS, Hubbard and Paul, heads of the largest West Virginia moonshine syndicate, were eventually convicted for the murder of Jefferson Richards. On the morning of December 23, 1933, Jeff Richards had engaged their brother Frank Duling in a high-speed chase as Frank was hauling a load of Franklin County moonshine to the brothers’ West Virginia markets. The chase resulted in the death of Frank Duling, and it was well known that the Dulings sought revenge. This conviction has remained in doubt, particularly after in later years other men claimed responsibility for the death of Richards, including Hallie Bowles, who claimed to several people and in his suicide note that he and another man were paid to commit the murder, presumably at the behest of Carter Lee.

  FORREST CONTINUED to run the Blackwater station, with Maggie at the counter and Everett Dillon at the pumps. No one ever saw a display of affection between them. He continued to help his father and brothers with their tobacco crops, and liquor continued to run through his station, though never in the same quantity.

  Howard moved to Martinsville and found work in the textile mills there. Throughout the years he kept a still up on Turkeycock, and each summer he and his brothers would gather on the mountain and make a small run. Lucy eventually bore four healthy children.

  Emmy Bondurant graduated from high school and moved to New Jersey, where she worked in a typing pool and shared an apartment in Newark with two other women. She eventually married and divorced later in life.

  JACK BONDURANT went on to run his father’s store and to raise beef cattle and tobacco in Snow Creek. Occasionally he had Forrest over for dinner, and Jack’s oldest son always marveled at the lump that developed in Forrest’s midsection after he ate, where the food was leaking through the lining of his stomach. The country hack that sewed him up after the shooting neglected to sew up the interior lining of his stomach, and a few minutes after eating, a bulge the size of a grapefruit would push out his shirt at the belly button. The boy would poke the mass with one finger, Forrest grinning even though it clearly pained him greatly.

  ONE EVENING IN 1941, after helping his father with a cattle sale, Forrest was crossing through the bottomland that separated Jack’s property from Granville’s when he stepped through the icy crust of Snow Creek and was wet through to his armpits in the icy water. He walked up the hill in the dark to Jack’s house, arriving late, when everyone was already in bed. He refused Jack’s offer of some hot food and drink and dry clothes, electing instead to go to bed in the back room. Forrest said he would be up and out in the morning before they woke. He seemed embarrassed by the whole thing.

  In the morning Jack’s oldest son, now ten years old, woke with a start. His sisters Lee and Betty Louise and his brother Bobby Joe slept soundlessly. His youngest brother, Granville Thomas Jr., would be born the following year.

  The room was cold and black and nothing moved, but the boy could sense that someone or something was down the hall. It was as if there were something pulsing through the walls, a wave of vibrating cold, and he got up without waking his siblings and chucked on his clothes quietly. The back-room door was slightly ajar, the air significantly colder there as it was the room farthest from the stove.

  Inside the boy saw a shape lying on the narrow cot in one corner, next to an old pie safe his grandfather had built, and boxes of paintings by his mother, simple oil landscapes. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the light, then moved forward. The boy touched the edge of a boot, hanging over the edge of the cot. It was cold and faintly wet. As the boy stepped closer, treading lightly on the boards so as not to wake the house, Forrest’s face came out of the dark, a mask of blue stone, his eyes open, his mouth set in a hard frown, a grimace of inconvenience. His fingers on the sheet, held to his neck, the nails gone purple, covered with a thin sheen of ice.

  YEARS LATER, when Maggie passed away, records revealed that she and Forrest had been secretly married for more than ten years.

  THE BOY STOOD in the dark room, the only sound his own breathing and thumping heart. He was frightened and alone. He looked over his shoulder, white-blond hair, widely spaced eyes, the nose of his father and uncles. You could tell by the stretch of his legs that he would be a tall man, as tall as his uncle Howard.

  The boy looks over his shoulder at me, at us.

  He is scared to move, unsure of what to do.

  He is the only one who knows we are here, that we are watching.

  This boy is my father, Andrew Jackson Bondurant Jr.

  Author’s Note

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, a few times a year my family would make the drive down to Snow Creek, four hours from Alexandria, to visit my grandparents. My father’s brothers and sisters all lived in the area as well, so the gatherings usually bloomed into full-scale Bondurant family reunions each time we came to visit; all the uncles, aunts, cousins, and others crowding into my grandfather’s old farmhouse for giant breakfasts and long, slow talks before the woodstove where little was ever actually said. I spent most of the time wrestling in hay-filled barns with my giant cousins, riding tractors in the early morning along muddy creek beds, and grabbing electric cattle fences because they dared me
to. My grandfather died in his late eighties; he had just bought a new truck the day before and was building a new house.

  I have many important memories of my time there, and of my grandfather; his quiet, hawklike face, early rides in the pickup to feed the cattle, the staggering stoicism of this man. I also remembered the back utility room where he had a gun rack up on the wall. This wasn’t so unusual; in those days in Franklin County shotguns and rifles hung from nearly any flat surface, and in many houses they still do. What struck me about this particular gun rack was the pair of rusty brass knuckles hanging from a nail just below the gun rack. As a young boy the idea of a man putting on the heavy metal implement, purely designed to crush another man’s face, was a thrilling prospect and I spent long periods of time gazing at those brass knuckles. To me they represented something remarkably primal, hanging there below the guns, as if to say: If you are still alive when I run out of bullets I will pull this hunk of metal off the wall and pummel you into unconsciousness. Back at the dinner table my grandfather’s heavy, placid face would take on a whole new light. I was terrified of him and fascinated about the life he had led.

  I didn’t know of his true past and involvement in the events of the early 1930s until much later. My father didn’t even know he had been shot until a few years before my grandfather’s death, when as part of his genealogical research he came across a series of newspaper articles documenting the events at Maggodee Creek in December 1930. When asked about the shooting my grandfather merely said: Oh yeah, shot me through here, and raised his shirt to show my father the entry wound under his arm. Not much more was said about it after that, which is the way my father’s family communicated about such things.